e nest;
Season this mixture well with salt and spice;
Twill make a pudding far exceeding nice;
And you may safely feed on it like farmers.
For the receipt is learned Dr. Harmer's.

[Sidenote: THE GOOD HORSE'S REWARD]

Richard Stapley's diary was continued by his son Anthony and grandson
John. The most pleasing among the printed extracts is this:--"1736, May
the 21st. The white horse was buried in the saw-pit in the Laine's wood.
He was aged about thirty-five years, as far as I could find of people
that knew him foaled. He had been in his time as good a horse as ever
man was owner of, and he was buried in his skin being a good old
horse."

[Illustration: _Ditchling._]

CHAPTER XXI

DITCHLING

Stanmer Park and Dr. Johnson--The Roman way down Ditchling
Beacon--Sussex folk in London--Jacob's Post--The virtues of
gibbets--Mr. John Burgess's diary.

Another good walk from Brighton begins with a short railway journey to
Falmer on the Lewes line. Then strike into Stanmer Park, the seat of the
Earl of Chichester, a descendant of the famous Sussex Pelhams, with the
church and the little village of Stanmer on the far edge of it, and so
up through the hollows and valleys to Ditchling Beacon. Dr. Johnson's
saying of the Downs about Brighton, that "it was a country so truly
desolate that if one had a mind to hang oneself for desperation at being
obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to
fasten a rope," proves beyond question that his horse never took him
Stanmer way, for the park is richly wooded.

On Ditchling Beacon, one of the noblest of the Sussex hills and the
second if not the first in height of all the range (the surveys differ,
one giving the palm to Duncton) the Romans had a camp, and the village
of Ditchling may still be gained by the half-subterranean path that our
conquerors dug, so devised that a regiment might descend into the Weald
unseen.

[Sidenote: LONDON'S VASTNESS]

Ditchling is a quiet little village on high ground, where Alfred the
Great once had a park. The church is a very interesting and graceful
specimen of early English architecture, dating from the 13th century. A
hundred and more years ago water from a chalybeate spring on the common
was drunk by Sussex people for rheumatism and other ills; but the spring
has lost its fame. The village could not well be more out of the
movement, yet an old lady living in the neighbou